Kubuntu update

Ok, I may have been a bit hasty with my previous assessment of KDE4. I threw together a live CD and booted the lappy into Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4. December's Linux Format magazine pointed out that the context menu for the K button has an option to revert to the previous menu structure; much better. I would imagine a full install would provide the precious Tango icons that I am so enamoured of, along with Plasma themes I could actually download, or modify as I wished. The live CD only had them displayed as a kind of preview, naturally, but I will double check to see if that is a glitch.

I still don't care for the black task bar, so I am hoping that is a bit more straight forward to change once I have it installed. I may do a clean install on the new system I am setting up, then start transferring data. Most of the software I have on 8.04 is running just fine for now, so after the new system is set up, I will be wiping that drive and setting it up to dual boot with XP, as well as adding another gig of memory. It should be a pretty sweet little system once that is complete, ready for playing around with some virtualization.

Mostly, though, it will be for World of Warcraft. Hopefully, my cable broadband holds out for the winter until I can replace the internal co-ax in the walls. Also, I think my Linksys router is going out, so that will be replaced with a wireless router. Newegg has a pretty sweet deal going on the flashable router Linksys offers, so I will be throwing Tomato or something on that as soon as possible.

Along with the RPG projects I have lined up, 2009 is looking to be a busy year.

------------------Further News------------------

Ok, that was a bust. Trying to upgrade to KDE 4.1 as a means of clearing up a few issues, the dependencies broke, killed my kdm, and the whole system was trashed. Rather than start over with KDE, I decided to give GNOME another try.

I have to say, it is pretty damn sweet. I am not the least bit disappointed, and I might leave KDE for other people. Even before the crash, I was not happy with the windows management. GNOME has been nothing but smooth in rendering windows, keeping track of widgets, and putting my fonts exactly where I expect them. I found I couldn't jump from 1024x768 directly to 1280x1024, but interim steps got me up there. Compiz has a few glitches while doing window tricks, but I am not running top of the line graphics, so that is to be expected.

All in all, I am now a GNOME user, and I am quite happy about it.